The
political class is aghast at the spectacle of one after another of
their holy icons falling: first it was David Petraeus, outed by a
lone FBI agent in Tampa who took the discovery of his affair with
Paula Broadwell to the House Republican leadership and effectively
dynamited the CIA chieftain’s career. Now it’s Gen. John
Allen, commander of US forces in Afghanistan: the discovery of his
“thousands of pages of emails” to Jill Kelley — a
37-year-old looker whose complaints of email “harassment”
garnered the full attention of the FBI and led to the downfall of
Petraeus — has him in the dock.

Who’s
next?

One could
easily succumb to the temptation to simply cackle, like Madame
Defarge, and attend to one’s knitting as heads roll. Rather
than give in to such pure indulgence, however, this writer would
much prefer to pursue the answer to a puzzling question: what is going on here? Is this just about
the rutting habits of the lords and ladies of Washington, the
national security realm’s version of Days of Our Lives — or is what we’re witnessing the equivalent of a palace
revolution?

I
would go with what Paula Broadwell’s father, Paul Kranz, told
the New
York Daily News:

“Broadwell’s
father said Sunday his daughter is the victim of character
assassination and implied the bombshell story is just a smoke screen
for something bigger.

“’This
is about something else entirely, and the truth will come out. There
is a lot more that is going to come out. You wait and see. There’s
a lot more here than meets the eye.’”

Of
course there is, but what in the name of all that’s holy is
it?

There have been
three major developments in this fast-moving story since my last
column on this subject: 1) The stunning revelation by Broadwell in a
speech given at the University of Denver that there were detainees
in the Benghazi “consulate” — really a CIA station —
and that the attack may have been an attempt to free them, and 2)
the rising visibility of the “shirtless guy,” the Tampa
FBI agent whose impatience with the progress of the investigation
led him to go to the House GOP leadership, an act that sealed
Petraeus’s fate — and, perhaps, Gen. Allen’s.
Which brings us to 3) the ensnaring of Gen. Allen in the
Broadwell-Petraeus net, which adds much fuel to an already raging
fire.

The
Benghazi angle may help bring the “why” of this whole
imbroglio into sharper focus. First, let’s set the context:
Fox News and the Republicans had been making a full-bore effort to
turn the Benghazi attack into a “scandal” that would
bring down the Obama administration, an “October surprise”
that would make short work of the anti-colonialist Kenyan. They spun
a narrative that had the President of the United States — and
his CIA Director — ordering a rescue team to “stand
down” while Ambassador Chris Stevens, and three others, were
murdered by Islamists. Broadwell’s “by the way there
were detainees in there” remark, uttered almost offhand, was
pushback, no doubt encouraged by Petraeus.

The
“shirtless guy,” who earned this description because he
reportedly sent shirtless photos of himself to Jill Kelley —
the recipient of Broadwell’s “harassing” emails — enters the picture as the key
catalyst who set the anti-Petraeus coup in motion. We are told he is
a friend of someone with a connection to Rep. Reichert (R-WA), who
brought the matter to Rep. Cantor’s office. But hold on, wait
a minute here …

Since
when does the FBI investigate “harassing” emails sent to
an ordinary American citizen? Sure, Kelley had a friend in the FBI —
the Shirtless Guy — but the question is why did the FBI’s
cybercrimes section agree to launch a lengthy and costly
investigation into emails that, by some accounts, weren’t that
big a deal? The Shirtless Guy, who is said to have become so
obsessed with the case that he was taken off it, must have developed
some suspicion of who was behind the emails, and the nature of
Broadwell’s connection to Petraeus. Whose instrument was
he?

I
gave my own view of the answer to this question in my last column,
and the attempt to take down Gen. Allen seems to confirm my
analysis. Who, you ask, would want Allen’s scalp? Well,
consider the General’s comments
after the latest blue-green attack in Afghanistan:

“ISAF
commander General John Allen told US 60 Minutes program in an
interview recorded before the latest incident, and scheduled to be
aired today, that insider attacks were unacceptable.

“’I’m
mad as hell about them, to be honest with you,’ he said.
‘We’re willing to sacrifice a lot for this campaign, but we’re
not willing to be murdered for it.’

“Gen.
Allen said that just as homemade bombs had become the signature
weapon of the Iraq war, he believed that in Afghanistan, “the
signature attack that we’re beginning to see is going to be the
insider attack.”

Insider
attacks make up the great majority of US casualties in Afghanistan,
these days, and with the Obama administration about to undergo a
general review of our troop levels in that country, Allen’s
open hostility to the mission would not sit well with the more
hawkish faction in the national security apparatus, i.e. the neocons
and their fellow travelers. So, he had to go, too — and it’s
a “nice” touch that they managed to get him in the
course of the same investigation, without having to bother cooking
up another scandal. Good work, boys!

One
aspect of the Great Pentagon Purge that has gone almost completely
unnoticed is this offhand little
tidbit
in a Washington
Post
story about the scandal,

“Prominent
members of conservative, Washington-based defense think tanks were
given permanent office space at [Petraeus’s] headquarters and
access to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided
advice to field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the
commanders were getting from their immediate bosses.

“Some
of Petraeus’s staff officers said he and the American mission
in Afghanistan benefited from the broader array of viewpoints, but
others complained that the outsiders were a distraction, the price
of his growing fame.”

So the
neocons were right there looking over Petraeus’s shoulder, and his
successor’s shoulder, giving “advice” that went
against orders from the top, i.e. they were undermining the mission
as conceived by the Pentagon, and no doubt actively subverting the
planned withdrawal. Did Gen. Allen throw them out? That he’s
been caught in the honey trap along with Petraeus should come as no
surprise.

The
military is quite a distinct entity from the War Party, and this
should be obvious to anyone who has been alert to the internal
debates in the national security bureaucracy over the course of the
past decade or so. There was pushback from the CIA and the
diplomatic community during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, with
spooks anonymously debunking the “weapons of mass destruction”
canard to the point where Dick Cheney had to personally go over
to Langley and stand over them to make sure they toed the neocon line.
There has been a similar rebellion against the idea of going to war
with Iran, another neocon crusade. The military is tired of these
endless wars: after all, they are the ones who have to fight them,
and are inevitably blamed when failure becomes all too apparent (and
the neocons run for cover).

There has
to come a point when the military is thoroughly fed up with being
the instrument of a ruthless and bloodthirsty cabal who think
nothing of sacrificing US servicemen and servicewomen on the altar
of their bloody ambitions. When that happens, from the War Party’s
perspective, it’s time to get rid of them. While the means
utilized may be rather complicated, it’s really just as simple
as that.

I should
emphasize that this is a working hypothesis: an attempt to make
sense out of what seems utterly senseless — the immolation of
the top tiers of the US military and intelligence establishment.
We’ll know much more when the genesis of this investigation —
a probe into a “cybercrime” allegedly committed against
an unpaid “social liaison” at Tampa’s MacDill Air
Force base — is revealed in more detail.

With
every passing moment, however, as more facts comes out, what began
as a suspicion is fast turning into a near certainty. Just look at
who is now being pushed
to succeed Petraeus
at the CIA — yes, I’m talking about none other than Jane
Harman, the same
person
who was overheard in the course of a wiretapped conversation telling
a “suspected Israeli agent” she would intervene to get
the charges against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman reduced. Rosen
and Weissman were caught red-handed stealing US secrets and
funneling them to their Israeli handlers. In return, the Israeli
agent promised AIPAC — the high-powered pro-Israel lobby —
would put pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to get Harman
appointed head of the House intelligence committee.

The
prosecution rests — for the moment.

Update: This
story is moving really fast, and there have been a number of
important developments in the few hours after I submitted it, but
before it was posted. To begin with, Paula Broadwell’s house
has been raided
by the FBI: they searched every room in the house and
carried out her computer and other items. This points in the
direction of a national security investigation, not one focused on a
charge of simple “cyber-stalking.” But of course we knew
that with the first report of finding classified
information on her computer.

In addition, more
information has come out about the Shirtless Guy, the Tampa-based
FBI agent who took Jill Kelley’s complaint to the Bureau. The
New York Times, citing an anonymous FBI official, reports:

“[T]he agent
became convinced — incorrectly, the official said — that
the case had stalled. Because of his ‘worldview,’ as the
official put it, he suspected a politically motivated cover-up to
protect President Obama. The agent alerted Eric Cantor, the House
majority leader, who called the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller
III, on Oct. 31 to tell him of the agent’s concerns.

“The official
said the agent’s self-described ‘whistle-blowing’
was ‘a little embarrassing’ but had no effect on the
investigation.”

But it had a huge
effect on Petraeus, who at that point was still
hoping to keep his affair with Broadwell a secret.
However, the proverbial cat had already clawed its way out of the bag.
On Oct. 31, when Cantor’s office placed a call to FBI
Director John Mueller, and on Election Day the Justice Department
informed John Clapper, director of National Intelligence. Clapper
insisted Petraeus step down.

What’s
interesting is that this was clearly ideologically motivated: no
need to wonder about the Shirtless One’s “worldview.”
Clearly he was striking a blow against what he considered the dire
threat of Kenyan
anti-colonialism — and that meant taking down
Petraeus. Clearly he intended the revelation of the affair to take
down the Obama administration, but Cantor held back. Why? We can’t
know for sure, quite yet, but my view is that he wanted the head of
Petraeus even more than he wanted Obama’s — and, at that
point, perhaps he figured it wouldn’t have helped Romney in
any event.

In any case, the
supposed hero of the neocons, the author of the Iraqi “surge”
which supposedly “won” that losing war, and the
architect of a new counterinsurgency doctrine the failure of which
has been portrayed as one long uninterrupted triumph — David
Petraeus, who at one time was rumored to be the neocons’
favored presidential candidate, wound up on top of the rather large
heap of bodies they’ve managed to pile up over the years.
After he pulls the knife out of his back, and has time to reflect on
the demise of a once gloriously successful career as an icon of
American militarism, perhaps he’ll tell us the whole story in
his memoirs. It should be quite a read.

NOTES
IN THE MARGIN

My
appeal to get my Twitter followers up to 2,000 has succeeded —
but let’s not stop there! I use Twitter as a kind of bulletin
board, where I post much of the material I’m going to use in
my column: it’s very convenient that way, and also a good way
to spread the message of non-interventionism while engaging the Bad
Guys cyber-face to cyber-face, so to speak. In short, it’s a
lot of fun, so don’t miss out: you can follow
me on Twitter here.